Philip Hammial


Philip Roby Hammial is an Australian poet, publisher, editor, artist and art curator. He has a long list of achievements in writing, publishing and sculpting. His achievements include thirty-two collections of poetry, thirty-four solo sculpture exhibitions, and acting as the director/curator of The Australian Collection of Outsider Art, twenty-six exhibitions of Australian Outsider Art in five countries.
Hammial's significance to Australian poetry has been recognised by the Australia Council, which awarded him a Senior Writer's Fellowship in 1996, an Established Writer's Fellowship in 2004 and the Nancy Keesing Studio at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in 2009.

Life

Hammial grew up in and around Detroit, Michigan. He graduated from Farmington High School in the late 50s. After three years in the engine rooms of US Navy ships he went to Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan, and then to Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, where he 'discovered' poetry, art, philosophy and history. Graduating with honours in English Literature and Philosophy, he went on to travel the world for a total of eleven years, visiting eighty-three countries & working in three – Denmark, England and Greece. In 1972 he arrived in Sydney on a tourist visa and nine months later was granted a resident visa. He is now an Australian citizen, Separated from his wife, he has one child, Genevieve Aloka, born in 1997, and has been living in the Blue Mountains since 1994. Hammial started work at the age of twelve and had over one hundred jobs in five countries before retiring in 2000. A member of the Woodford Bush Fire Brigade between 1995 and 2003, Hammial fought many of the fires that raged through the Blue Mountains during those years. An environmental and human rights activist, he has worked as a volunteer for the Wilderness Society and for the Free Tibet Action Group.

Literary and artistic career

Hammial has published thirty-three collections of poetry and is the editor of "25 poètes australiens", an anthology published in Trois-Rivières and Paris. He is also the editor with Ulli Beier and Rudi Krausmann of the seminal "Outsider Art in Australia". As at April, 2017 he has had 411 poems published in 125 journals in 16 countries. His work has appeared in 29 poetry anthologies in seven countries. As the director of The Australian Collection of Outsider Art, he has curated or helped to organise twenty-six exhibitions of Australian Outsider Art – in Australia, Germany, France, Belgium and the United States. The most recent exhibition – "Australian Outsiders" – spent two months at the Orange Regional Gallery, seven weeks at the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and then went to the Halle St. Pierre in Paris for six months where it was very well received. Hammial himself is also an artist. He has had thirty-four solo exhibitions and his work has been included in over seventy group exhibitions, including two in Paris. His work can be found at the Rex-Livingston Gallery in Katoomba, NSW, Australia. In 1979 he became the editor of Island Press. The oldest small press in Australia still publishing poetry, Island was founded in 1970 by Philip Roberts and has published sixty titles to date.
Two of his poetry collections were short-listed for the Kenneth Slessor Prize – "Bread" in 2001 and "In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter's Children" in 2004 and one was short-listed for the ACT Poetry Book Prize – "Skin Theory" in 2010. His thirty-second collection, "Detroit and Selected Poems", was published by Sheep Meadow Press in NY State, one of the oldest and most prestigious poetry presses in the U.S. His poems have appeared in 31 poetry anthologies in seven countries and in 129 journals in sixteen countries. He has represented Australia at fifteen international poetry festivals – Poetry Africa 2000 and 2016 in Durban, South Africa; the Festival Franco-Anglais de Poesie, Paris, 2000 and 2015; The World Festival of Poets, Tokyo, 2000; the Festival International de la Poésie, Trois-Rivières, 2004 and 2018; the Micro Festival, Prague, 2009 and 2015; the Festival Franco-Anglais de Poesie, Melbourne, 2010; the Festival Internacional de Poesia de Medellin 2012; the Festival Internacional de Poesia de Granada 2014; the Val-de-Marne International Poetry Festival, Paris, 2015; the Struga Poetry Evenings, Struga, Macedonia, 2015 and the Istanbul Writers' Festival in 2016. In 2001 he had a one-month writer-in-residency at the Fundacion Valparaiso in Mojacar, Spain and for six months in 2009/10 he was the Australian writer-in-residence at the Cité International des Arts in Paris.

Awards